Law Firm Web Design

If you’re looking to build a website for your law firm, it’s not the hardest thing to create a landing page for it. After all, most everyone probably knows someone tech-savvy enough to use a drag-and-drop type of website builder necessary to ensure your legal practice has an online presence. If not, they can find a “generalist” type of web developer to design a site with the basic look and functionality they’re going for. There are downsides to pursuing either one of these options, though.

When it comes to a first impression, you only get one chance to make one. Anyone with a discerning eye can tell when they’re viewing a well-designed website. It not only looks good, but it also works well. When coupled with well-written or professionally produced video marketing content, the combination thereof performs well in search engines.

Although our GAVL team has grown over the years into a full-service legal marketing firm, a large part of what we still do to this day is building attorney websites. We build sites for small law firms with single offices as well as ones for large, multi-state practices with multiple partners and associates. Read on, where we’ll share more about our expertise in law firm web design and explain how we can help your firm grow.

Signs That a Law Firm Website Isn’t Professionally Built

So, perhaps you’ve put up a website for your law firm, but you’re not getting the traction you would expect. While visitors may click on it and view it, they’re not taking the desired actions you want them to, like filling out the contact form for your help. Do you know why that’s happening?

As you might have guessed, while it could have to do with user perceptions that you won’t mesh well, which could be attributable to the content that’s there, this could be happening for a whole different reason which is due to your law firm website’s design.

Some aspects of a law firm’s website are tell-tale indicators that it wasn’t built and isn’t managed by professional web developers, which often cause users to run away, which include:

• The site loads slowly: There are various reasons why sites may not have fast loading speeds. Code may be too bulky, unused widgets or plugins may be taking up space or they may not have been updated to their latest versions, or there may be bandwidth or hosting issues.
• Navigation or usability is poor: The use of your website should be intuitive. Users should feel naturally inclined to click certain places on the website and be confident that it will take them to certain information or allow them to complete certain actions (like getting in touch with your law firm). A website with a confusing flow can decrease dwell time, resulting in lost conversions.
• Readability isn’t good: The goal is for the website’s content to be formatted in a visually appealing way, for there to be headers, an easily readable font, contrasting colors for text versus hyperlinks, and more. If what’s there seems disorganized or hard to read, they’ll leave your webpage and find another law firm website that’s easier on the eyes.
• Images used are of inferior quality: How many times have you visited a law firm’s website and have seen a poorly cropped image of a lawyer enjoying an off-day, one that’s outdated, or otherwise unbecoming of someone you’d want to serve as your legal counsel? It happens all too often, and believe it or not, even low-quality stock images send potential clients running to another firm—no matter how good of an attorney you may be.
• It’s a one webpage setup: It’s not enough to put up a single dedicated page on a paid domain and to call that a law firm website. Instead, having practice area and landing pages, a separate contact page, perhaps a blog, and other types of content across multiple webpages is ideal in that it’s aligned with what other law firms do and gives you an opportunity to deploy a search engine optimization strategy that allows you to rank for multiple keywords.

Long story short, when you’re trying to attract a prospective client and simply perform well in search engines, the combination of appearance, functionality, and content matter. These affect rankings if a site isn’t easily crawlable and content isn’t optimized. These factors can, in turn, affect your firm’s ability to establish credibility among its target audience.

What Features Do Great Law Firm Websites Built by GAVL Have?

Now that you know what makes for poor attorney websites, we want to share how the ones we build at GAVL are different. Our web developers and designers take time to ensure your site is devoid of any of the tell-tale signs above that indicate that you’re viewing an amateur-built law firm website design. We also make sure that your site has:

• Strong branding: Does your law firm have a logo, and is it featured throughout your website? That’s one part of branding. So too is maintaining a consistent color scheme, page design, font choice, and messaging. Design elements like plugins and widgets can help create a streamlined website design with functionality that gives it that professional touch.
• Ease of navigation: We put your website visitors and their needs first when creating designs. We take time to review site analytics to determine what content users want to see and where they’re expecting to see it on the site so that there are no impediments to potential clients becoming informed and reaching out.
• Mobile-friendliness: All law firm websites that we build have a responsive design, meaning they’re optimized for use on all types of mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets.
• Great-looking photos: Since first impressions matter, we use your best photos to create stellar graphics that showcase your firm’s attorneys.
• Shows off your professional association memberships: There’s nothing more confidence-building than when a potential client sees a listing of attorney or firm awards listed there for them to see. You’ve worked hard for these accolades, and they matter to site visitors, so we’ll display them front and center on your homepage and elsewhere on your law firm’s website.
• Contains a contact page: Wouldn’t it be frustrating if your law firm website’s content displayed your knowledge of your practice area, giving readers confidence in your ability to handle their case, yet they didn’t see how to connect with you? We build websites that make your contact information easily visible so that you and your team can wow every potential lead with your professionalism, empathy, and legal competency.

While there are certainly more factors that play into whether your website is appealing enough for users to stay around, in short, an engaging law firm website is one that users dwell on for a bit, and don’t immediately click off because it doesn’t seem outdated, is navigable, and it contains adequate content to address common client inquiries.

How Can Our GAVL Team Improve Your Law Firm Website and Grow Your Online Marketing Reach?

When we take on a law firm website design project, we put in our research to ensure that we understand what it is you do and how to best highlight that. We look at analytic data to determine what portions of your site your users gravitate toward and make sure to create a custom website design that capitalizes on that, as it’s what’s necessary to drive traffic and convert leads that are necessary to fuel your law firm’s growth.

While law firm web design is a big part of what we do here at GAVL, a significant amount of our resources are also allocated to all things legal marketing, including:

• Drafting search engine optimized (SEO) law firm content writing like web content, practice area pages, social media, and blogs
• Managing law firms’ digital presence in search engines and social media
• Cinematic video production for legal advertising purposes
• Maintaining optimal functionality of law firm sites
• Planning for and launching backlink outreach

We’ve had the pleasure of working with a wide variety of law firms of all sizes in many states and are prepared to help the following types of practices with their website needs:

• Personal injury
• Mass tort
• Family law
• Criminal law
• Employment law
• Bankruptcy law

If your goal is to have a professional web designer build you a new website that has all the design basics you could want plus extras, then our GAVL team is eager to help. We can create a law firm website that contains valuable information that funnels more traffic your way in no time.

Take a look at our portfolio of some of the best law firm websites that we’ve created for our valued clients, then schedule a free consultation so we can discuss what we can do for you.